2019-2020 Forum on Kinship

At a moment when, in many societies around the world, a more capacious imagining of community is being deliberately erased or forgotten, to be replaced by parochialisms and hatreds, the Wolf Humanities Center topic for 2019–20 calls for a reappraisal of the myriad possibilities for remembering, challenging, and reimagining kinship.

The Wolf Humanities Center offers funding for one book manuscript workshop each semester to support pre-tenure humanities faculty in the School of Arts & Sciences who have a complete or near-complete book manuscript that has not yet been sent out to a press.

Annual Topics

Stuff. It's all around us. We buy, sell, trade, design, collect, hoard, preserve, and trash it. From sacred relics to space debris, things define us and remind us, making tangible our beliefs, anxieties, and values. Join the Wolf Humanities Center in 2018-2019 as we explore the materiality and meaning of stuff.

In partnership with Penn's American Sign Language Program in the Department of Linguistics, the Wolf Humanities Center is delighted to provide ASL interpretation at many of the live events in our Forum on Stuff, and in their online counterparts.

The collaborative Wolf Humanities at Large programs go beyond the Center's annual topic, showcasing events and people on and off campus that make important contributions to our understanding of culture. One such effort is the Wolf Humanities Center's partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival, which began in 2012 with Penn Provost Ezekial Emanuel speaking on The Ethics of American Health Care. Other collaborations have featured the award-winning cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the premiere of the comic opera Biennale at Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation, and HAIKU, an international conference on the role of the humanities within the creative research university.

Fellowship Opportunities

Each year, the Wolf Humanities Center provides fellowships for Penn students, Penn and regional faculty, and postdoctoral scholars conducting research related to our annual topic. Fellowship opportunities are available in the following five categories: